Art on Mondays, Day 4

Egads! It was Monday again and time to paint. My kids have been asking me every day to “do art” and I kept holding them off until Monday because I’m pathetic, and start hyperventilating when I think about the mess it’s going to create. But at least with Irene Luxbacher’s 123 I Can Paint, I have a plan.

Lesson #4 (pp 12-13) is called “Busy and Bright” and it teaches the vocabulary word complimentary colors. It also uses a technique where you squirt blobs of paint on your background color, and then use scraps of cardboard to pull down the paint and make them look like buildings.

In retrospect, I can see what I did wrong as the art teacher this time. (That’s an improvement, because normally I can’t even figure out what I did wrong as an art teacher, even though I clearly messed up.) This time, I didn’t squirt big enough blobs of paint on the background. So when Bruce tried to pull down the skyscrapers, they were really sparse. He of course freaked out, and then I had to cajole him back to the table with a lot of Mindset coaching. “Well of course it will look awful if you give up half way through. Stick it out and it will look better. I think this is hard too, but that’s what makes it so fun”. etc.

Bruce did make it back to the table, and I think his end was result was pretty good. All of the drama meant that I never actually introduced the concept of complimentary colors and we also never put the finishing touches on our paintings which were supposed to include a road, people and cars. Whatever. Don’t’ blame Irene Luxbacher. This was all my fault!

This is Jenna’s. She’s 3.

Here is Bruce’s work. He’s 7.

Here are my results. I would appear that I am an 8-year-old painting, but really I’m in my 30s. 🙂